


The Way to Dawn

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Ars Paradoxica (Podcast)
Genre: (except not?), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-22 21:20:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9625754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: Wherein Sally makes it back to the future with Sharma, after all. Even in 20█, life still goes on.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first draft of this so long ago, (when it was like, way more relevant to current canon) but never got around to posting it. So here it is now! Fun.

Sally’s breath comes too fast, in urgent starts and stops (more consistent, at least, than Sharma’s). She is holding the wire that could take her back to her present, and Nikhil is bleeding out on the floor next to her, and she can't think straight; can't, can’t, _can’t_.

“The anchor,” Sharma says. “It’s not done.”

The anchor. “You’re right.” Sally looks at the timepiece. “I can still close the circuit.” 

There’s a harsh, metallic noise as Whickman shoots at the machine. Sally almost stops, all her instincts demanding that she get as far away from the gun as possible. But the timepiece doesn’t look too damaged. She can still make it.

There isn’t time to think about it. She closes the circuit. 

Around them, everything goes black, then white, then blue. Sally holds tight to Sharma’s bleeding body in her arms and squeezes her eyes shut against the brightness.

When she opens them, she is somewhere else. Somewhen else. She feels vaguely nauseous. But Nikhil is still bleeding, still trying to talk, and neither of them are much safer than before.

“You did it?” he asks.

“Yes,” Sally says. Her voice is cracking as she speaks, barely audible. “We made it, Nikhil, you’re going to be okay. You _have_ to be okay.”

She needs help. She needs to—to call 911, or something. There has to be someone. Sally looks up sharply, and takes her surroundings in an instant: an empty room, with nothing of anything in it. Bare white walls. It doesn’t look like the building they were in in Point-of-Exile, but she has no way of knowing if they’ve moved somewhere else, or if the thing’s just been torn down and rebuilt in the intervening time. 

There’s a door to one side of the room, and Sally is halfway to it when she hears the faint sound of voices from the other side.

 The door swings open, and a woman enters. The smile on her face falters as she sees them: Sharma, curled tight into himself on the floor, Sally standing above him with her hands stained with his blood.

“Dr. Grissom,” the woman says. 

“Listen,” Sally says, “I don’t know how you know my name, but my friend is hurt. He needs help.” Her words are far too muted for the situation. But what else can she say?

“A medical team is on the way,” she says. “They should be here—“ A clattering of footsteps in the hallway. “There you go,” she says, as a small mass of people enter the room. One of them approaches Sharma ahead of the others, begins unpacking what Sally assumes is a med pack. Sally watches, unable to tear her eyes away from the sight of blood and bandages and far-too-close-to-death.

“Now,” the woman says again, “I think we should let our doctors do their work, yes?”

“I guess,” Sally says, her gaze not leaving Sharma. She still doesn’t know where she is or who these people are. She has no context.

The woman escorts Sally out of the room, leaving Nikhil alone with a group of perfect strangers. (Although, to be fair, Sharma is only not a stranger himself by a handful of days.)

A few photos and things hang on the walls in the hallway, but Sally doesn’t get a good look at any of them; her guide keeps moving, and she follows. The woman stops maybe twenty feet away from the room where Sally and Sharma had arrived—and, looking back, Sally realizes she isn’t sure which room that was anymore, out of all the identical, numbered doors.

“I promise you,” the woman says, “our doctors are the very best. I have full confidence in his recovery.”

“I hope you’re right,” Sally says. The woman doesn’t respond, and finally she adds, “You never told me how you know my name.”

"Everyone knows your name," the woman says, and then pauses. "Well, everyone in a certain line of work."

“I see,” Sally says.

The woman smiles. She holds out her hand to shake. “I suppose I should welcome back to the land of the living, Doctor. My name is Elizabeth Dunajski,” she says. “I’m in charge around here, more or less.” 

"It's... nice to meet you?”

"You as well." 

“I’m sorry,” Sally says. “But—what exactly is ‘here’? Is this, like, future-ODAR?”

“I should think not,” Dunajski says. “I do apologize for not being specific, though, Dr. Grissom. You’ve been out of commission for quite a while; you have no reason to know what’s what. No, this is not ODAR. This is the Anchorite headquarters.”

Well, that totally clears that up, doesn’t it?

Dunajski doesn’t elaborate, just looks at Sally a moment. Looks at her with—what? Pity? Gratitude? Utter indifference? 

"So, uh..." Sally says. "Is there... is there something I can do for you?

"I believe I have an arrangement in mind that would be mutually beneficial to us both. I'm here to offer you a job, Dr. Grissom."

"Of course you are.” Sally sighs.

"In exchange for some help with a certain project," Dunajski continues, "my organization would help you to get back into your feet. I shouldn't have to remind you that—"

"And if I refuse?" Sally cuts in, because she has played this game before and she is not about to relive the past few years of her life all over again. She's come too far to just go back to the starting line.

" _I shouldn't have to remind you_ ," Dunajski repeats, "that as far as the law is concerned, Dr. Grissom, you died nearly seventy years ago.” Oh. “We have access to quite a lot of resources. I think you’d find we would be able to help you get back on the map, so to speak.”

"So you're what, blackmailing me? You won't help me unless I work for you? I’m sorry, but… no. I'm not doing this again. I'm not getting involved in any more—" Sally breaks off.

Dunajski is smiling at her. It's a sort of haughty, condescending smile, but something about it stops Sally dead nonetheless with it's familiarity. There is something about this woman. Something about the way she speaks, careful but light, something about the the color of her eyes, a dull blue-gray.

“Have… have we met?” Sally says.

Her first thought is that she must know her from her original time. Some quirk of probability landed this same person in a different job, and Sally just can’t quite remember the original context. But that isn’t it. Or she doesn’t think it is.

“Doubtful,” Dunajski says.

“Fair enough." She should probably just drop it. "You look familiar, that's all."

“Do I? I imagine you knew my grandmother.”

“What are the odds of that?” Probably no lower than of Sally meeting the same person in two different timelines, but… still. It’s more likely that she’s entirely mistaken, and Dunajski just has one of those faces that can look like anyone in the right light.

“Fairly high,” Dunajski says. “My grandmother was Helen Partridge.”

 _Helen_. All it takes is the name for recognition to click.

“You look like her,” Sally says, as though this entire conversation hadn’t already established that.

“So I’m told.” 

A pause.

“You’re not related to—that, is, you’re not Partridge’s granddaughter, are you? I mean, Anthony’s.” Could she be more awkward?

She’s pretty sure she already knows the answer to her question, anyways. But she has to ask. She has to know.

“No,” Dunajski says. That’s that, then. “She remarried.”

“Good for her, I guess,” Sally says. Helen Partridge hated her, in the end. But she supposes she’s glad the woman was able to move on, after everything. She hopes she was happy; is too scared to ask. And there are other questions, of course. Did Dunajski grow up on stories of ODAR exploits? Or did Helen hide it all, bury it until—what? Her granddaughter got this job here? It seemed too great a coincidence.

But Dunajski claps her hand together and says, “Now that we’re done reminiscing, I think it’s time we discuss my offer."

Now that she knows, she has to keep reminding herself that it isn’t Helen standing in front of her. It isn’t even as if she _wants_ it to be her; they were never close, even before things got rough between her and Anthony. But there’s something utterly surreal about looking at this woman, not ten years younger than Sally, and thinking that she’s two _generations_ younger than the man who was her best friend for years. 

What’s more, Dunajski is the closest thing to a familiar face she’s likely to find in 20██.

"What exactly are we talking about here?"

"It's nothing you haven't done before, Doctor. I simply need you to build us a timepiece."

“Oh, is that all?”

“Would it be so difficult?”

“It took _years_ ,” Sally says, “both times. And that was with a full team of scientists.”

Dunajski takes a step back and looks at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be the legendary Sally Grissom?” she says. Sally is only pretty sure she’s being sarcastic.

“No,” she says, anyways. “I’m just me.”

"Those two statements aren't necessarily contradictory."

Sally laughs. 

Oh, hell.

"Fine," she says. "I'll take the job."

***

Legally—or perhaps, to be more accurate, _il_ legally—Sally Grissom was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1981. (Whoever thought of that has a rather cruel sense of humor.)

She lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Denver, Colorado, and works ten miles away for a private research company that is actually a secret organization conspiring against a more-secret branch of the U.S. government. Because her old life wasn’t complicated enough.

The city is a surprisingly pleasant change, though. The anonymity of the city crowds is almost comforting, and she appreciates there being space between her and the agency; even more between her and ODAR.

She’s never sure what to do with her free time.

She'd always thought that, if she ever made it back, she would spend the first week glued to a computer screen, eating nothing but terrible, processed food and blaring Top 40s pop music. 

She could go out and explore the city. She could do anything, so many things that have been barred from her for so long. But she doesn’t. She's sits in her room and reads, or makes lists of things to buy for the apartment, or mostly does as little as possible because all she really wants to do is forget that she's here. That she’s now.

She goes into work every day, and starts on the newest iteration of the timepiece. She wonders if they should call this one something else, but never winds up bringing it up. She meets the assistants, who seem mostly competent but stutter and stare whenever she tries to talk to them. (There are downsides to being a historical figure.)

She doesn’t really have any friends. She he doesn’t feel like she has much of anything in common with her new coworkers. They all seem so foreign, shiny and new like city around her. She’ll adjust, probably, surely. 

She just wishes she didn’t feel so, so alone.

***

She found the public library early on. After all, if she's going to be a technophobic hermit who never leaves her apartment, she has to get her reading material _somewhere_. (Buying something from a bookstore feels like too much of a commitment. Too much like she's accepting that she's going to be here long enough to need to own things.)

This time, though, there's a line for the checkout counter. Apparently this time of afternoon is rush hour at the library. 

Sally takes a seat at one of the computer tables to wait.

And then, because she has nothing else to do, she goes online. Clicks past the library home page and off into the ethers of the web.

The _Internet_! Real and there and right before her on this screen. Wikipedia is a real thing. And YouTube. And Facebook! Okay, she doesn't have a Facebook account in this timeline. But holy shit, just, conceptually, the idea that everyone she's ever met is instantly available like this. No one disappearing out of town to get away from secrets. It's all right there.

The colors on the screen are bright and warm, the lines crisply sharp, modern graphic designing  at work. 

Sally's really here. She's really back. 

And _Google_. Google is such a wonderful thing. Like, if Sally could have taken one aspect of modern technology back with her to the 1940s, that’s what she would have chosen. All the information you could ever need, instantly available. Some of the information is complete bullshit, of course, but you can’t  have everything. It’s still amazing.

_Google Search: Office of Developed Anomalous Resources._

ODAR went public sometime in the ‘60s. Quietly, slowly, subtly, but there are records of their existence. It’s hard to get a read on how well-known they must be by the general populace; information is scant. And there’s still no mention whatsoever of what they _do_. No mentions of the timepiece. That much, at least, is still secret. 

_Google Search: Sally Grissom._

It’s not the first time she’s googled herself. She’d tried it before, when she had been working on the particle accelerator for a few months, and her friends pushed her into it, joked about how she was a famous scientist now. They were five pages in before they found anything that was actually about her.

This is different.

At first, it doesn’t look like it is. There are various news articles and social media pages of people with names vaguely similar to hers. There’s a conspiracy theory website or two, managing to link her to ODAR while still getting all the details wrong. If anything, she can be relatively certain that there’s no parallel-universe version of her in this timeline who’s life she could be fucking up by existing.

Then she finds something else.

Sally finds her own obituary. 

It's in the midst of one of these conspiracy sites, a scanned portion of a newspaper from Point-of-Exile. There isn't much there, of course. Anyone who really knew her in the 1940s would have been too worried about keeping their secrets. But it's there. Ms. Sally Grissom, 19??-1949. 

" _Doctor_ ," she mutters aloud, and then laughs at herself, but it comes out hollow.

It makes sense, of course. She just disappeared! As far as they were concerned, she was dead.

Had the same thing happened in her original timeline? She didn't know if it could, if that reality still existed in any far-off corner of the multiverse. She liked to think it did. But it had somehow never occurred to her until now, staring at this page, that they must have mourned her. Instantaneously vaporized in the midst of an experiment. Tragic, right?

Tragic.

Sally sits back in the chair, staring at the screen, like maybe if she spends enough time admiring the smooth edges of the low-tech library computer, then everything will magically be okay. She lets out a long, slow breath, and goes back to the keyboard.

_Google Search: Esther Roberts._

_Google Search: Chett Whickman._

_Google Search: Jack Wyatt._

Whickman died some ten years after Sally did, in some mysterious classified incident she could find no more information on. Jack and Penny, she’s able to ascertain after a reasonable amount of digging, made it away from ODAR, got married not too long after, and lived out their life. The trail goes cold sometime around the ‘80s, and Sally doesn’t know if she wants to know how they die, so she lets it go. 

Esther Roberts, however, worked for ODAR for almost the rest of her life. This in itself means she’s shrouded in secrets, but Sally likes to think it means she was happy. That she kept doing the things she was passionate about. Maybe, possibly? 

Esther died not ten years ago of natural causes.

And it’s this fact that hits her. More than seeing this computer, more than the disorientation of time travel. Her friends are dead. It’s not just that she won’t see them again; it’s that they’re _dead_ , buried and gone. How can that possibly be true, when she spoke with Esther not three weeks ago?

She’s never going to speak with her ever again. Or any of them, these people who made up such a huge part of her life. Not Esther, not Jack, not Anthony. 

Things weren’t perfect, when she left. Things weren’t easy. Jack was probably already dead to her, in all fairness, and Esther barely seemed to know her, and Partridge…

Partridge.

Holy _shit_.

The Blackroom. 

Could she—was he—

This will require additional research.

***

“Dr. Grissom?"

Sally looks up from the timepiece 2.0 prototype. 

It probably couldn't even be called a prototype, yet; the thing was more like a loose collection of parts that would probably, eventually, be able to do the same thing that had thrown her this way and that the through time for the last several years.

"How's the work going?" Dunajski asks.

"Oh, you know," Sally says. "The usual."

It was difficult. The second anchor point (the middle of nowhere, Colorado, 20██) meant that all of the calculations had to be redone, and even the hardware elements that should have been the same as the originals were difficult to remember off of the top of her head. (These people have eyes, ears, and hands at ODAR, but they don't have a timepiece blueprint. Their original, she’s told, was stolen; and now that it’s gone into disrepair from years of overuse…)

"I see." Dunajski was quiet a moment. "I have news for you."

Sally turns to look at her. ”Oh?"

"Dr. Sharma is up and about again."

"He's okay?" 

Dunajski nods.

If Sally coming back had saved his life, had gotten him to the medical treatment he needed, then maybe it was worth it after all.

"He's asked to speak to you," Dunajski says.

"He—he has?"

Dunajski nods again, and hands Sally a slip of paper. "This is the address of the hospital our contacts have him at," she says. After a moment, she adds, "And I hope I don't have to remind you that you can't tell anyone else about this. If ODAR were to find out Sharma has made it to the present, this whole operation would be blown."

Sally takes the note. "Thank you," she says.

"Not a problem. If there's ever anything else I can do for you, Dr. Grissom, please don't hesitate to—"

"Can you get me in touch with the Blackroom?"

Dunajski blinks, and doesn’t respond, at first. Then, ”No,” she says. "I'm sorry."

Sally nods. ”I suppose it was too much to hope you had access to something like that."

"What? No. Dr. Grissom, _ODAR_ hasn't used the Blackroom in years."

***

There's one thing she can try, of course. She doesn't know why she didn't try it before talking to Dunajski. Maybe it just felt too much like lying, to not mention it first. She's done with lies, or she'd like to be.

She has the phone number memorized. She'd had it in a little handwritten address book, too, but that got left behind in 1949. (And would have had no use here, anyway.) 

There's one flaw in her plan, of course. There are no pay phones in 20██. In retrospect, this is obvious. But she hasn't gotten a new cellphone yet; she's been putting it off, even though she's pretty sure she'd be able to get the organization-that-cannot-be-named to pay for it. 

She'll have to borrow someone else's cell.

The assistant who shares a lab—or what passes for a lab here—with her is a quiet person. Sally can’t even bring herself to recall her name. But as they’re heading home that day, Sally works up the courage to say, "Hey, could I—could I borrow your phone?"

"Um," she says. "Sure?"

She hands it over. Sally dials the number for the Blackroom. 

It rings once. Twice. Three times. Then: "The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected."

Dammit.

She gives the woman her phone back.

"What did you..."

"It's not important,” Sally says.

***

It is a rather complicated problem. 

There aren’t, as far as Sally is aware, too many telephone towers that stood undisturbed from 1943 to 20██. It simply isn’t very probable. It’s also so far proved close to impossible to research. 

But there has to be another solution. She keeps thinking about it, keeps planning, keeps working, scribbling notes and running thought experiments and trying to solve the puzzle that doesn’t want to be solved. It’s a side project, something for when she isn’t working on the timepiece, but it’s more than that, too.

In the setup she’d figured out in 1949, the Blackroom had transmitted from ’43 and been picked up there, “programmed” not to not be fully broadcast until later. Sally could send things back to the Blackroom by using the residual time weirdness of that afternoon in Philadelphia to send things back there, and the same radio tower would transmit it because it was already there.

The problem was, Sally doesn’t have a radio tower to work with; the one she used last time has long since been torn down. But she does have things she didn’t have when she was last figuring out this problem.

She has nearly-unrestricted access to her timepiece. Not to mention, a plethora of twenty-first century tech that she’d have killed to have with her back then.

She’s doing another late-night internet search on signal-based communication, with her newly-acquired, very-own laptop, when the thought hits her: She doesn’t need to have an analogous broadcasting site in 1943 if she can send the signal back with the timepiece. 

When she leaves work the next day, there are streams of wires pouring out of the prototyped timepiece that come together into a USB cable.

She’s going to send Partridge the internet. 

Which probably makes it sound a lot simpler than it is. But she thinks she can do it. At least, she can get enough connection to the Blackroom that they'd be able to talk again. (Could they do video, instead of just audio this time? She doesn't think the setup he has would be able to handle it, but maybe...)

She starts plugging things into her computer. She's a physicist, not a software developer, but the new timepiece is already running on circuit boards, and getting it to interface shouldn't be _too_ impossible.

That doesn't mean it isn't difficult.

***

The hospital room looks, in short, like any other hospital room. It is almost the purest expression of the concept of a hospital room. The walls are clean and white, and a bed off sits towards one side, where Sharma is sitting, looking at something on his phone.

Sally knocks on the wall near the entrance; the door had been wide-open when the nurse had led her here.

Nikhil looks up. "Sally!"

She smiles. "Hey," she says. "How are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm fine. I get shot in the chest every day." 

It’s probably joke, but Sally cringes. "I'm sorry," she says. "Whickman—I never expected—"

"You couldn't have expected it." She isn't sure that's true, but she doesn't push it. It isn't as if she _wants_ him to hate her for it.

She crosses the room, and sits down on the bed next-to him. "You're really okay, though?”

“So I’m told.”

She barely knows Sharma, really, but seeing him here in the present provides a sense of… Continuity, almost. A reminder that the world she left behind in 1949 is just as real as this one. And vice versa.

He asks her what she’s been working on, with the company, and she tells him about the new timepiece and then, after a moment, tells him about the other project, trying to connect to the Blackroom. Maybe she shouldn't trust him so easily. She isn’t sure what Dunajski would think if she found out what Sally was doing, and she isn’t sure that Sharma won’t tell her. But Sally does trust him, despite any better logic. 

“Were you and… Partridge, that close of friends,” Sharma says, “that it’s worth spending all of this energy on him?”

“I don’t know,” Sally says. “I mean, we were—we _are_ —but, it’s not even really about him, you know? It’s… it’s about holding on to that part of my life in any way I can. It’s—“ Sally laughs. “It’s about not taking no for an answer.”

“Even when the ones who’re telling you ‘no’ are the laws of physics?”

“Especially then.”

***

Sally figures it out on the twelfth trial. It was such a ridiculous, tiny glitch that had been stopping her from doing it. She had to program in the information to let Partridge’s computer even receive her message in the first place, but now, she thinks, maybe, that it will work.

She is alone, in the lab, at the end of the day, long after everyone else has left the facility. She almost wishes she wasn’t. It would be nice if Sharma was here, to have someone with her for this small success.

Sally flips the switch on the timepiece. Hits the audio record button on the computer.

It’s less elegant than a phone, somehow. It’s bigger, for one thing, far bigger than it needs to be. This mishmash setup of timepiece and computer would not be marketable; if she was going to make this a regular thing, she’d need a nicer interface, probably just an audio recorder and a Wi-Fi router hooked up to the timepiece. But this isn’t about it looking picturesque. It’s about seeing if it works.

“Testing,” she says aloud.

The little broadcast light is on.

“Hey, Anthony,” she says, and her voice cracks a little. “I really hope you get this. I… Well, I guess I’ll just come right and say it. I’m sending this from 20██.” 

She stops. She could say so much more. She could tell him everything that has happened; could finally tell _someone_ how all of this is really a fucking tragedy, that she is scared and miserable when she thinks too long about what she’s left behind. No one here would understand that, but Partridge might. He left it behind, too.

But she has to be absolutely sure this is working, first.

She stops recording. And she sits, and she prepares to wait.

The response is there the instant she hangs up. Because of _course_ it is. This isn’t like before, when they were piggy-backing on normal Blackroom transmissions. This time, Sally is sending her own transmission, and she doesn’t know how the Blackroom computer interprets it, exactly, but it must be giving them their own little channel of communication.

She listens to Partridge’s message. He asks questions, mostly. Who's Sharma? Why is she in the future? _How_ is she in the future? 

Sally answers, her voice cracking. She’s talking to Partridge again.

They send messages back and forth, and the connection speed makes it more like a real phone conversation than anything they’d established before. From Partridge's perspective, barely any time has passed since they last talked. (Sally wonders for a moment what there is to prevent her from having called _before_ her last message, but she has enough to worry about right now without borrowing trouble.)

It was all real. 1943, ODAR, all of it. Anthony is here, talking and laughing and crying with her as she tries to tell him everything that has happened since they last spoke. Anthony was real, and so was everything else. Sally went to the 1940s and back. The present is real, and here, now, but she doesn't have to let go of the past if she doesn't want to.

She doesn't think that she does.

***

She continues work on the new timepiece. The connection with the Blackroom did not, technically speaking, mean the thing was working just yet. It could send things back to the _Eldridge_ in 1943, but this new version of the machine needs to be able to do more. And she isn’t quite there yet.

She has confidence that she’ll get there, of course. But it’s a complex machine, and she has to take it slow. If she were to try to make it work before it actually could, the side effects could be potentially disastrous.

Even just thinking about it is confusing. Sally had long-since come to the understanding that time is not completely linear. But that was really only adding one additional dimension to her previous understanding of causality—you could move forward at one second per second, and you could also move back towards the _Eldridge_.  

But now she has to contend with the concept of being able to move as far forward, and as far back, as one wants to. What does that do? What did that world look like, with rival organizations vying for control not just of the here and now, but of all of time? 

Has it already happened? She doesn’t know how much Dunajski has been telling her, how much the Anchorites have managed to accomplish in the sixty-odd years since Sally disappeared from the face of the planet. And yet. And yet. Is this something she wants to help bring about, really?

Or will it happen anyways, with or without her help, and Sally would only be ensuring the “right” people were in power? But who was she, to say who was right? Who was anyone?

You can see how this line of thinking quickly devolved. To tell the truth, it was easier to try to ignore it. To just focus on the things here in front of her: the math and the wires and the tests. She’d gotten good at that, in all those years working for ODAR. She isn’t entirely sure whether that’s a good thing.

She doesn’t know if Partridge understands, but he listens, when she tells him. It isn’t as if he has much else to do. 

She doesn’t tell Sharma. Sometimes she wants to. He was released from his hospital stay a few weeks back, and they still talk sometimes, after work. It’s a strange relationship, though. Nikhil laughs at her jokes and asks her about her work, and Sally wants that to be enough, but sometimes she wonders if their friendship will ever be anything more than that shared experience of a handful of days.

She’s pretty sure he’s kept her secret, though. About Anthony, and the Backroom. She appreciates that.

She makes progress on the timepiece. She makes progress on reintegrating herself into the modern world, and she’d be lying if she said it wasn’t easier adjusting to a new era the second time around. She knows which things to look out for, at least.

She still isn’t sure that this is the life she wants to be living.

***

Sally stands in Dunajski’s office, the paper with the final test results clutched tight in her hand. “It’s done,” she says.

“What is?” Dunajski, sitting at the desk, looks up from her computer.

“The timepiece. I built it. It’s finished.”

“That’s wonderful news.” Dunajski actually smiles.

“And so,” Sally says, but then falters, not sure how to continue her sentence. 

“And so?”

“And _so_ ,” she says again. “I’m leaving.”

Dunajski stands. “I don’t follow.”

“I quit,” Sally says. “I did what you asked, but I’m not sticking around here any longer. I’m leaving this lab, this organization, this town. I didn’t make it back to the present to spend the next five years doing the exact same thing I’ve been doing.”

“I see.” Dunajski takes a few steps towards Sally. “I’m sorry to hear that, obviously. But if you’ve really made up you’re mind…”

“I have.”

“Then I guess this is goodbye."

"Yep."

Silence. The two of them, staring at one another, waiting for something else to happen.

"Thank you," Sally says, finally. "For... Well. For helping me get back on my feet, I guess."

She turns to leave.

***

"I'll keep in touch," she promises Sharma. It's later that same day, a different room in that same building. "It's easy to do that here."

"Here?"

"Now?" Sally tries. "You know what I mean."

"I do. And I do look forward to hearing from you again."

"You too."

"Although, Sally—"

"Yeah?"

"I am surprised. After all that work you put in on getting your little communications project running."

"Yes, well..." Goddammit, Sally. "I got the system up and running, like you said. It's portable with my computer now."

"That's—"

"I know it's probably like, super irresponsible! These are still top-level scientific secrets and I'm using them for personal matters, but this is just, like, really important to me that I can have this, okay?" Sally hesitates, looking at his face. "Please don't tell Dunajski?"

"I was going to say that was impressive."

"Oh," Sally says. "Yeah. Um. Thanks. And bye, I guess."

Nikhil smiles. ”Goodbye, Sally."

***

She still doesn't have a lot of belongings. She'd been avoiding putting down roots, and while that’ll probably be a difficult habit to break, for now, it's convenient. So it doesn't take long for her to pack up her things. She has her legal matters settled with Dunajski, and there’s nothing left for her here but to leave.

For the first time in five years, Sally doesn't have anyone to report to.

Here goes nothing.


End file.
